Posted
by
BeauHDon Sunday March 04, 2018 @12:06PM
from the mixed-bag dept.

Kirsten Grind and Douglas MacMillan report via The Wall Street Journal(Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn't help the world's largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee. The lawsuit, filed by Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked at Google for nine years, including four years as a recruiter at YouTube, alleges the division of Alphabet's Google set quotas for hiring minorities. Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren't female, black or Hispanic, and to "purge entirely" the applications of people who didn't fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.

A Google spokeswoman said the company will vigorously defend itself in the lawsuit. "We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity," she said in a statement. "At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products." People familiar with YouTube's and Google's hiring practices in interviews corroborated some of the lawsuit's allegations, including the hiring freeze of white and Asian technical employees, and YouTube's use of quotas.

Here's the easy solution to this problem. Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously. If it gets the point of the interview and you've still got people being biased or discriminatory, then you've got bigger problems because at that point there's no excuse for falling back on some preconceived notions as everyone who makes it there should be qualified to work at your company or your screening process sucks.

Anything else is going to create a perception of unfairness regardless of what kind of noble intentions you might have. One thing that always astounds me is that the people who constantly bang on about white or male privilege and how that provides unfair benefits for some always seem to want to enact policy that enshrines unfairness as a fundamental concept. If you think that unfair treatment results in people being dissatisfied or outright disgruntled, then why the hell would you think that actively creating unfair conditions wouldn't result in the same conditions. To some degree I think this is partially (among a great many other things) responsible for the rise in what's been called the alt-right and has played a part in why someone like Trump was able to win the election.

The accusation is, the general American population is 78% white, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Arab, x% Jewish, 51% female. If your work force does not have the same percentages you are discriminating.

Instead of general population as the criterion, if you use STEM graduates of the top 100 or 200 US colleges, the percentages might not look so terrible for Google. If Google could say, "our workforce reflects the talent pool we recruit from" and that argument is accepted it would be good.

Google is not making that argument, "the population of top grads from top schools differs significantly from the general population. What can we do?".

The reason is, this argument has been used in the past to actively discriminate against the minorities. So it does not carry much weight among the general public. So Google is in this no-win situation.

The accusation is, the general American population is 78% white, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Arab, x% Jewish, 51% female. If your work force does not have the same percentages you are discriminating.

No, I've never heard anyone seriously claim that. The only time it's used is as a straw man to avoid addressing the actual argument, which is that there are wide ranging systemic issues and companies should do their bit to address that.

If not that, then what should the number of black, female, etc. employees in software development be? You can't argue that it's too low or that the numbers are an indication of systemic issues if you don't have some expected value. One could make a similar argument with just as much support (that is to say very little) that the number of those groups employed is too high.

I also don't see how Google, Amazon, or any other company is in a position to address societal issues that are far removed from their c

If not that, then what should the number of black, female, etc. employees in software development be?

Quoting from a comment above:"Instead of general population as the criterion, if you use STEM graduates of the top 100 or 200 US colleges, the percentages might not look so terrible for Google. If Google could say, "our workforce reflects the talent pool we recruit from" and that argument is accepted it would be good."

That's exactly the criterion that should be used. The question of whether racial minoriti

If the percentages that complete a STEM degree don't match the population as a whole, then a workforce that focuses on STEM will never match the population as a whole.

But they aren't applying for those courses because when they graduate they won't get jobs!

(Deputising for AmiMoJo, who's having a lie down after a fit of the vapours caused by someone pointing out that you can't claim under-representation for a group without stating a baseline for what the level of representation should be)

But they aren't applying for those courses because when they graduate they won't get jobs!

Fine, then use STEM-related high school marks. Or SAT scores. There are far better metrics to use than general population. If we did that, we'd have to immediately stop hiring female nurses, psychologists and teachers to address the minority population of males in those professions.

There is definitely a problem here, but given that STEM fields were almost entirely white dominated 50 years ago in NA, but now are whi

While access to education is a huge issue, I'd add that at the recruitment stage it can help to consider non-traditional backgrounds. What I mean is that not going to a prestigious school doesn't mean that person can't code.

In fact in low level embedded development where I work, a degree isn't all that relevant when interviewing. They don't teach this stuff on most courses and so we need to look at examples of work and talk to the candidate. We need to consider if we can teach them the necessary skills.

I don't believe that even if you assume that a given labor force must match gender and racial demographics that any one business that fails to meet those criteria must be biased. If you were to assume that, you'd also have to argue that the NBA is horribly biased as they have a disproportionate number of black athletes relative to the population of the U.S. and no women at all. There are plenty of other professions where the numbers are similarly slanted such as the petroleum industry, nursing, commercial f

"The accusation is, the general American population is 78% white, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Arab, x% Jewish, 51% female. If your work force does not have the same percentages you are discriminating."

Actually, the numbers are more like "73% white (including Hispanic) 12% blank, Asian 5%, 5% "other" and about 3% two more more mixed race.

White non-hispanics are actually in the very low 60% range. In CA, white non-hispanics are in the mid 40% range. Births in CA of Hispanics are out pacing white n

When I started in CS in college, there was a fair representation of women. It may not have been exactly 50%, more like 30-40%, but they certainly were not rare. Fast forward a few decades and women are rare in engineering and R&D, even more so in IT. Biology did not change, this decline is absolutely due to people and sociology, not because women are not suited to the fields or that they're inherently not interested.

Anyone who thinks this is the natural way things should be today is deluded, probably

The accusation is, the general American population is 78% white, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Arab, x% Jewish, 51% female. If your work force does not have the same percentages you are discriminating.

Says who? I have never seen anything remotely like that used as a legal argument. Do you have evidence for this assertion?

The accusation is, the general American population is 78% white, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Arab, x% Jewish, 51% female. If your work force does not have the same percentages you are discriminating.

Which is only true if the talent pool you are drawing from has the exact same proportions.

The accusation is, the general American population is 78% white, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Arab, x% Jewish, 51% female. If your work force does not have the same percentages you are discriminating.

Of course, this is made even more comical because only 60% of the people working for Google are white.

So they're not only discriminating against white people, but the very justification for doing so merely further demonstrates their racism.

Nope. Having the wrong gender/race mix is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing in a civil suit.

Reference?

Every legal precedent I can find regarding discrimination requires the prosecutor to show that equivalent candidates were systematically approved/rejected on the basis of race. I have never seen a legal argument made based on the racial characteristics of an employers workforce.

If that were a valid legal argument, I would expect to see many more lawsuits of sexism in heavily male or female dominated indu

Asians are actually pretty prevalent in tech. Depending on location, you'll find them between 1:2 and 2:1 with whites, averaging out to a 1:1 ratio globally as you expand your sample size from a single company to the city, county, state, and country levels. In this field they are not a minority.

Not really, I'm making an entirely different point. White and asian males are the majority of the pool of qualified candidates in this field so, of course, they'll make up the majority of workforce in this field. We don't need to fix white and asian males making up the majority of this workforce; what we need to fix is the lack of interest in this field on the part of women and people of other races. And we need to do that by making the field more attractive to them, not by attempting to force them into it

Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously.

It is necessary for HR and hiring personnel to be bigoted . . . otherwise diversity cannot be achieved.

Diversity is necessary for folks who cannot compete in a system based on equality.

Diversity means that some people need to be treated "more equal" than others.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Yeah I know right! Changing the colour of your skin is trivial for the job interview.

If it gets the point of the interview

Ok you addressed it, but you don't seem to see the point. These are policies enacted by high-ups. The interview is irrelevant in the face of policy. They aren't looking for the best technical candidate in the first cut, and they aren't looking for them in the interview either.

Here's the easy solution to this problem. Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people

I think there is an even easier solution: encourage and even force Google and YouTube to live by the principles they advocate and support politically. Let them blacklist all white and Asian males in their hiring process and then let's see how well their business does with those kinds of policies in place.

Here's the easy solution to this problem. Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously.

Sounds easy at first but impossible in practice.

Imagine an applicant fresh from college. The resume collection system removes the name and gender of the applicant and replaces it with a numeric identifier. Instead of "Jennifer Jones" it puts, "Applicant 79876". There are still schools that accept only men or women, if the applicant attended one of these schools then how can that be hidden? Is any mention of the name of the school removed? The college that people attended is important as some schools ha

It seems to me that people implementing racially discriminatory hiring practices should avoid using words like "purge" in emails. Note to Google HR: you might also want to watch your use of words and phrases like "cleanse", "purify", "rats", "vermin", "final solution" and the like. When used in that context, people tend to take them the wrong way.

It's interesting to note that music schools and orchestras have regularly used blind auditions [theguardian.com] since the 1980s and 1990s. The applicant sits behind a curtain during their music audition, so the judges can only hear the music, not see the person.

One thing that always astounds me is that the people who constantly bang on about white or male privilege and how that provides unfair benefits for some always seem to want to enact policy that enshrines unfairness as a fundamental concept. If you think that unfair

People state you can't prove a negative all the time it is simply not true. Proof by contradiction is proving a negative. You assume something show that something leads to contradiction, therefore you have proved the original statement is false.

In your reindeer cannot fly the problem is not the negative but you there exists at no reindeer that can fly. In your positive example just because you showed n reindeer could fly doesn't prove all reindeer can fly. You could prove not all reindeer can fly.

For every problem, there is a solution which is easy, simple and wrong. So, let's see...

Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications

aaaand herre we go. That works as long as there is no public information about you. If you have anything relating to a public profile, like publications, presence at conferences, positions on standards bodies, patents and so on and so forth, then that information is out there.

Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously.

Yeah, good luck on that when you've got 1,000 SJW groups breathing down your neck for not hiring more minorities and women. You have to understand that, above all else, SJW's want reality to conform to their beliefs. And chief among those is the belief that, without discrimination, woman and minorities will always be proportionately represented to the overall population in every job (well, all the GOOD jobs, anyway--they don't give a shit about the crappy jobs). Therefore, if your workplace pays well and is

If it were race blind, and all candidates equal, then the diversity of the applicants would match the workplace. Using prejudice to fix prejudice will never work. Look at what happens when a minority is now hired, everyone will think they just got there by the color of thier skin as many really are inferior due to lowered standards or rejecting the more qualified but wrong race/gender thus reinforcing the notion that this is the extra help these people need to be on par with the superior race/gender. It

Ding ding! Found the winner. You address the inequality by providing better education, pre and after school free activities, better availability of food and help for lower income families. These problems will sort themselves out far faster.

But how do you fix it? Part of the problem is that a lot of people don't see discrimination as a problem if it's not happening to them or their group. Leaving things as they are does not solve the problem either.

One problem I see is that people are quick to condemn reverse discrimination, but they are much more quiet about the original discrimination. That is they hate the tit-for-tat but don't hate the tat.

I'll go one step deeper here. Let's say I'm white, and fairly well off, but have never discriminated, been racist, or even slightly so (in terms of new age micro aggressions etc...). Saying I'm guilty of privilege, I'm wrong, I've ruined lives by being racist simply for my color or family heritage IS racist and part of the problem. Racism and sexism are problems that can affect everyone and saying it is ok against white males because they deserve it gets you what we have today - divisiveness, broadening

I notice something whenever I hear some fake progressive scumbag ranting. It's always some inherited wealth private school twat, lecturing working people about their "checking your privilege". The whole "social justice" hypocrisy is just another tactic used by the bourgeoisie to divide and oppress the masses.

Another company says they found no statistically significant difference - but even though they were trying to eliminate bias against women, men did better as a result of their gender being hidden: http://blog.interviewing.io/we... [interviewing.io]

I think this has gone too far. Fighting for equality of opportunities is one thing but being racist to achieve it is another.

Reverse racism is simply racism it doesn't matter what group in targeted. Social justice isn't justice. Feminism is not about equality anymore it doesn't care about other genders it's only about women. People fought long hard against racism and inequality. The last thing we need is to find new victims (ie. Men, Caucasians and Asians this time around) .

It seems that Wilberg raised concerns about the hiring practices that his manager had introduced, along with other employees. For example, a black woman complained that she was only ever being asked to interview black candidates, which seems to be to make up a numerical requirement. If the claims here are to be believed then the hiring manager was incompetent and trying to cover it up with quotas.

Google's HR sanctioned the manager and put a stop to the quotas. That may well save them from the discrimination claims, because the fixed it when it was reported.

I wouldn't call that "fixed". They moved the manager to another role (still employed and still on the same team), and they did not stop with the quotas. Yes, they tried to delete internal references to it, but they also created a new team that only had diversity quotas. Besides, they still had the recruiter's performance review tied to the number of diversity hires and not the number of total hires.

Of course at this stage it's all allegations, but discovery should reveal whether those can be substantiate

People ignored the old victims. Fingers in their ears, believing racism was a thing of the past or that the way things are is the way they should be. Now suddenly when it's their group being discriminated against, they notice it and it makes front page news.

I think we can all agree that Google and YouTube probably did this. If they didn’t do this exactly, they're basically saying they'd like to do it if they could get away with it.

All applicants to Google and YouTube should say they "identify" as a lesbian refugee from Honduras named "Sofia Espinoza". After you're hired, you can say you had an epiphany and you now "identify" as who you were born as. You can change it back to Sofia the week before performance reviews. If they doubt you, call them racist and transphobic.

Sorry if I offended your religion by suggesting unworthy wrong-race, wrong-gender types pose as the correct-race, correct-gender, correct-lifestyle individuals you venerate. You're welcome to refuse to extend your worship to Sofia Espinoza because you don't think she is genuine.

Some of us don't feel the calling like you. We would rather treat all races and both genders the same rather than exalting some and degrading oth

I'm not sure what your point is. You should definitely build a time machine and go back and fix history if you can. If you can't, best to leave ancient grievances in the past rather than continually reliving them day after day and visiting them upon new generations of people who are innocent of what their ancestors did.

You should want diversity in the work place. So don't throw away resumes based on race or gender or other protected classes. Treat them the same, even if you don't like their accent or color, look at the resume. If two people are equal, why always choose the white male? But...

I know companies don't hire only on merit. When I see only the smartest women get hired but tons of mediocre or incompetent white men are in the workforce, in all departments, then hiring is not being done on merit. When a minority

I'm a gay immigrant. I decided long ago that I don't want to work for companies that want to discriminate against me, and I'm not going to use nondiscrimination laws to force them too. Why would I want to work for a homophobic or xenophobic company? Why would I want to help them succeed in business?

The same is also true for YouTube and Google. They might make an exception for a nominally white male if he is gay and an immigrant like me, but I am not going to make an exception for them.

Good for you! If I'd been discriminated against, I'd probably exploit whatever I could.

Then you obviously don't value yourself very much and view a job as some kind of favor bestowed upon you. I have always viewed my contributions as being valuable to a company, and if a company is stupid enough to reject me over some non-job-related attribute, why would I want to contribute my value to them? There are plenty of other companies to choose from.

There are people who will take the undesirable job because they need a job. Maybe they'll leave later to someplace more comfortable to work. But if you have no job, that's often more uncomfortable than working for a bigot.

A Google-CodeCademy award program [archive.org] offered $1,000 bonuses to teachers who got 10 or more high school kids to take a JavaScript course, but only counted students from "groups traditionally underrepresented in computer science (girls, or boys who identify as African American, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native)."

Minorities, Behold! This is what success looks like
Asians were not allowed to become citizens till recently, 1960s. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese who came to California during the gold rush were harassed, and their better claims were usurped, they were relegated to working on less productive claims, they were paid less for their gold, and when the gold rush ended they were mostly chased out of the country.

In 1906 an Indian man named Bhagat Singh Thinde made the crazy argument that he was White, (He argued he was from a high caste, despised low caste people, had enough prejudice in him to qualify as White. No one was offended by that argument, but Judge Sutherland, SCOTUS, ruled that he was Caucasian but not white;-)).

They worked steadily, played by the rules of the game, concentrated on getting ahead personally. No long marches demanding equality, no serious law suits alleging discrimination,... Over the years they are punching 10 times their weight. 2% of the general population, 20% of top STEM grads, 20% of Intel scholarships and 99% of top spelling bee and 85% of top geography bee...

Yes, they had to much better than general population to get there. Asian kids need to score 150 points more than the White kids in SAT to get into the top colleges. Yes, the average Asian kid is suffering and is in stress because the expectation is set so high by the other Asian kids. But these are the problems of success,....

I do hear complaints of discrimination among my friends, but it is more like to be something like, "I am the senior most nephrologist with much better publication record and I should have been named the head, but they gave the post to some White Guy. Anyway chairmanship involves mostly talking to the donors and getting projects from the pharma companies, so I don't care"... sour grape syndrome?

People should remember that Google is not a single entity. it is a huge company with branches all over the place. While the corporate types may dream of unified policies, it is entirely possible that some parts of Google are run by extreme progressives (i.e., no whites or asians need apply), while other parts may be dominated by a different atmosphere.

The bottom line should be: hire people based on their capabilities, not their plumbing, eye color, or other irrelevant characteristics. If it turns out that c

...So the smarter choice is to shutup about it while you're at work, advocate for change as your personal hobby at home, and leave your employer out of it. There's a reason the tired old rule exists about not talking politics or religion in polite company....

You don't understand. It's not a hobby, it's a religion. It's how they know they're better than you. Without it, their shallow misanthropic lives would be seem meaningless — just an endless series of bitter score-settling and grievance dramatization that leaves them surrounded only by smug, unhappy people like themselves.

as always with a mega corp follow the money. This is all about cheaper labor. Women _are_ underrepresented in tech. The 'whys' of that aren't important to Google. What matters is there's an entire half of the population that could be trained up to work for them (thereby depressing wages and lowering costs) and isn't.

Me? I made damn sure my kid didn't go into tech. Sure, any job can be over taken, but tech is one of the cheapest to train and therefore easiest to outsource to poorer countries where wages

Almost every company or business cares about making the world a bit better. Maybe it's just to make the small world inside their homes better. But it's not just about money, money, money. Companies give money to charity, they try to keep the workforce happy, they may try to keep the customers happy, and so forth.

And even when you look at only the bottom line, keeping the community happy is good for business. Don't dump toxic chemicals in the river, don't use child labor, and so forth.

That charitable donation was a tax write-down. Keeping staff happy is a cost of doing business. It's factored into the budget under "buying just enough pizza for staff to reduce hiring and training costs"

A tax write off is never free. Sure, you get a small fraction of the charity back on taxes, but never 100%. In the past, even in the not too distant past, it was common to keep the workers uncomfortable, it was considered ok to shout at them, not give them breaks, exploit the hell out of them. The time was when no one thought that a happy staff was important to the bottom line.

Having a diverse workplace is turning into one of those things that keeps the staff happy and keeps the customers happy.

Kudos for mentioning the money angle, which is really what it's about. Programmers are too expensive, and come from an isolated demographic. By trying to expand the demographic, they're trying to increase labor supply to cut wages. People can go on PC rants all day long, but in the end it's just business.

I know someone who works for a federally funded research and development lab in the DC area. The HR department has initiated a campaign to "diversify" the workforce by bringing in more "early career" individuals. This organization has a more or less "points-based" pay scale (you get so many points for each year of experience, for each advanced degree, etc.) that determine your pay scale regardless of your ability or fit for the job. I'm sure the fact that the "early career" folks will be paid less based

You are posting as anonymous coward, but let me be on record to say that Youtube and their parent company have been taken over by the biggest racists on this planet.

This ^^^^ no one should be judged by skin color or gender. It's strange to see people who claim to not be racist say it's ok to not hire a white or Asian person because of their skin color but to not hire a black person is racist. It's all racist.

Over here, the law forbids one to discriminate against minorities only. It's perfectly fine to state "if equally qualified, we will give preference to minorities X, Y, or Z". But if for instance you run a supermarket in an immigrant neighborhood, your work force would be predominantly from Turkish or north African descent, with very few whites. In this case you are not allowed to say "if equally qualified, we prefer white applicants in order to increase diversity in the workplace". That's discrimination

Or you could make smalltalk with the counter staff and maybe learn something about humanity and shared values. The world really could become a better place by you talking about the weather. Living in the home of the brave isn't just about making the place more like ancient Sparta.

Someone wearing some full face covering leaving only her eyes showing? No.

I can't hear her. I lipread to supplement poor hearing. Yet, somehow, if I ask her to remove the full face covering I'm the one that will be described as an intolerant bigot, even though she's the sexist discriminating against disabled men.

It's strange to see people who claim to not be racist say it's ok to not hire a white or Asian person because of their skin color but to not hire a black person is racist. It's all racist.

Haven't you heard? SJW's have redefined racism to mean something only white people can do. Everyone else is INCAPABLE of racism, because...umm...power dynamics or some shit. Because we all know that some dirt-poor white kid living in a trailer park in Appalachia has all the power over weak oppressed people like Barack Oba

Hey, they had one straight white male character (who all of us with half a brain knew from day one would turn out to be a bad guy, of course).

If it's any consolation, Star Wars now is even worse. At least Discovery has one white guy who's a hero (though he's only allowed to be a hero because he's gay). Star Wars doesn't have a single white male hero anymore, period--gay or straight. The first thing the new Disney-SJW Star Wars did was kill off all the legacy white male heroes.